• Rutgers isn't in SoCal, it's in New Jersey.
  
• Douglass Gardens is also in NJ.
  
• And "Douglass Gardens" is plural. You consistently got the name wrong.
  
• And it isn't a dormitory; it's an apartment complex.
  
• The fastest you can get to Douglass Gardens from the airport is 33 minutes... and that requires taking I-95. The Displaced Mrs. Pollifax has a description of what the end of the drive looks like.
  
• "A gust of wind swirled around his body, lightly chilling him." It's difficult to tell whether there was wind at the time, because Newark on April 25th, 2017 had a mix of windy and calm periods. The temperature was pretty steady in the low-50s Fahrenheit that day, though, so I'm surprised you'd say the wind would only lightly-chill somebody from Arizona – the temperature in Phoenix the same day was in the 70s.
  
• "a place that had recently had a large uptick in tenants for no apparent reason." The introductory story mentions that it just had a huge downtick in tenants.
  
• "A man, maybe late thirties, early forties, opened the door." I wonder who he is, because the wiki doesn't list any males in that age range in residence there. (I suppose it might be Kyusaku Natsume, Takashi Kasuga, or one of the male members of Gorillaz; their ages aren't listed on the wiki.)
  
• Bob's way out of character, compared to the Bob shown in the stories.
  

• Within three paragraphs of his first mention in the story, we know that the version of Bob Schroeck in the story is old enough that what's left of his hair is a mix of strawberry blond and white, he runs a forum, he takes information security seriously, and he knows Rob.
  
• It takes just as many paragraphs to learn that Rob Donaldson grew up in Ottawa, knows the area that his future residence is in, is retired because he's fed up with office politics, has needed glasses for a while, and knows Bob.
  
• Within five shorter paragraphs, we know that Cassiopée Bright speaks French, was in a dead-end job that she wanted to get out of, and is married to somebody who works at a game company.
  
• And it takes us three paragraphs to learn that Harley Waters is on the outs with his family but not because he wants to be, and loves motorcycles as long as they aren't Harley-Davidsons.
  

(03-28-2025, 01:44 PM)robkelk Wrote: Why not start your own residence building? We have nothing written about Arizona yet, despite there being residences in California and New Mexico. As long as you don't steal anyone else's fictional characters, you have an entire state to tell stories about... and you have a couple of places relatively nearby for your new building's residents to meet.

1. Figure out who's living there. Who are your displacees? For both meta and in-universe reasons, they'll probably come from one or more of your own fandoms. (But like Rob said, don't poach anyone already in the setting.) Sometimes it's fun to pick characters who'll have some serious fish-out-of-water issues. And don't forget that, like Epsilon, your opinions of your displacees as real people may change from your original opinions of them as characters in a favorite story.
   
2. Remember that your displacees arrive as groups bound by their common fate/destiny. That means their enemies, if any, should also show up -- although they won't arrive in the same place or time. Come to think of it, all the protagonists don't necessarily have to show up at the same time, either -- a good example would be the characters from RWBY, who have arrived in four groups at three different times (and I'm toying with a story idea that will bring in a fifth at yet another time and place).
   
3. Regarding those enemies, don't worry how they'll tie into the overall plot. We can work that out later.
   
4. Once you know who and how many your residents are, look for a real-world location that you can, um, repurpose for your residence. Almost every residence in the project is or was a real building circa 2016. (I can think of only three exceptions to that right now.)
   
5. Check out the residence pages on the wiki for some ideas for how you want to run your residence. Does it operate kind of like a boarding house, like Blossom Apartments, the Beach House or Gulfside Rest, where the residents basically have private rooms and eat communally, and the manager is actively caring for everyone? Or is it a big place like Douglass Gardens, where everyone basically has a complete apartment with their own kitchen and the managers just make sure everything's running on an even keel and no one's wanting for anything? Stories like Rob's and the Moving Days series will give you a good sense of the different management styles, too.
   
6. If your residence is home to more than one band of displacees, how/when do they arrive? At the moment we have only one residence where characters from multiple works all showed up at the same moment, and that was mainly for the dramatic irony as they were all time travelers. In general while the first batch shows up in time for the opening of the residence, it's usually good for story purposes to have other groups show up in waves every week or two until you have your core population in place.
   

(03-28-2025, 10:54 PM)Norgarth Wrote: so now my SI is an NPC manager of an apartment complex that had just opened up near me (and available to house displacees that someone wants to use for a specific story but don't need long term, so I wasn't completely useless )

(03-28-2025, 10:54 PM)Norgarth Wrote: I volunteered to be a Manager early on,  then realized I had no real ideas to contribute to the setting.

so now my SI is an NPC manager of an apartment complex that had just opened up near me (and available to house displacees that someone wants to use for a specific story but don't need long term, so I wasn't completely useless )

(03-29-2025, 04:56 AM)Norgarth Wrote: huh, I hadn't realized (remembered?) that the Blackadder Goes Forth Crew were there. 

(03-29-2025, 12:31 PM)AvrosRaven Wrote: my style of writing is "do absolutely no research and let the masses correct you" at least for now